The industrial design of modern mobile phones leaves little printed circuit board (PCB) area for the antenna and often the antenna must be very low profile because of the increasing demand for slimline phones. At the same time the number of frequency bands that the antenna is expected to operate over is increasing.
When multiple radio protocols are used on a single mobile phone platform, the first problem is to decide whether a single wideband antenna should be used or whether multiple narrower band antennas would be more appropriate. Designing a mobile phone with a single wideband antenna involves problems not only with obtaining sufficient bandwidth to cover all the necessary bands but also with the difficulties associated with the insertion loss, cost, bandwidth and size of the circuits needed to diplex the signals together. On the other hand, multiple narrow-band antenna solutions are associated with problems dominated by the coupling between them and the difficulties of finding sufficient real estate for them on the handset. Generally, these multiple antenna problems are harder to solve than the wide-band single antenna problems.
Most mobile phones generally make use of monopole antennas or PIFAs (Planar Inverted F Antennas). Monopoles work most efficiently in areas free from the PCB groundplane or other conductive surfaces. In contrast, PIFAs will work well close to conductive surfaces. Considerable research effort goes into making monopoles and PIFAs operate as broadband antennas so as to avoid the issues associated with multiple antennas.
One way to increase bandwidth in an electrically small antenna is to use multi-moding. In the lowest bands, odd resonant modes may be created which may be variously designated as ‘unbalanced modes’, ‘differential modes’ or ‘monopole-like’. At higher frequencies both even and odd resonant modes may created. Even modes may be variously designated as ‘balanced modes’, ‘common modes’ or ‘dipole-like’.
Loop antennas are well-understood and have been used in mobile phones before. An example is US 2008/0291100 which describes a single band grounded loop radiating in the low band together with a parasitic grounded monopole radiating in the high band. A further example is WO 2006/049382 which discloses a symmetrical loop antenna structure that has been reduced in size by stacking the loop vertically. A broadband characteristic has been obtained in the high frequency band by attaching a stub to the top patch of the antenna. This arrangement creates a multi-moding antenna useful in wireless communication fields.
The idea of multi-moding an antenna is also not new. An example of good design practice here is the Motorola® Folded Inverted Conformal Antenna (FICA), which excites resonances in a structure that exhibits odd and even resonant modes [Di Nallo, C. and Faraone, A.: “Multiband internal antenna for mobile phones”, Electronics Letters 28 Apr. 2005 Vol. 41 No. 9]. Two modes are described as being synthesised for the high band: a ‘differential mode’, featuring opposite phased currents on the FICA arms and transverse currents on the PCB ground and a ‘slot mode’, which is a higher order common mode, featuring a strong excitation of the FICA slot. The combination of modes can be used to produce a wide, continuous radiating band. However, the FICA structure referred to is a variation of the PIFA and the Nallo and Faraone paper does not teach multi-moding of loop antennas.